


(when god is dead and the devil takes hold)

by irishais



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:34:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27114056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishais/pseuds/irishais
Summary: Coping happens best (or worst) in the dark.
Relationships: Rinoa Heartilly/Squall Leonhart, Seifer Almasy/Quistis Trepe
Comments: 3
Kudos: 27





	(when god is dead and the devil takes hold)

Silence hangs around his shoulders like an old gray coat, and before him, Seifer Almasy considers a knife. 

It’s a simple thing, thin sharp blade, pearl-inlaid handle. Fancier than he would normally go for-- but this isn’t his knife, and he doesn’t know where it’s come from. A streak of moonlight hits the blade, highlighting it in suggestion. Offering. 

Maybe it’s Xu’s. Seems like her kind of thing. She’s got more knives than she probably knows what to do with, and it may be the only reason she hasn’t missed this particular one, innocuously silver against the hideous beige carpet. 

Seifer reaches for it, stills his hand half an inch away. 

It’s just a knife. 

(How did it get here?)

He lets his fingers close around the handle. 

It’s just a knife. 

The edge is keen and bright. He runs it across his thumb, drawing forth a bead of blood with no pain at all behind it. 

Behind him, his phone emits a soft chime; before him, he watches little red drops drip onto the floor. The phone chimes again. 

_Leave me_ alone. 

\--

The sea rushes up to the tips of her toes, and she half-expects the pale pink polish to have been eaten away with every wave’s retreat. Instead, she wiggles her feet, pink comes through drenched sand intact, and she no longer feels like she’s unmoored entirely. 

Unstable, perhaps, as if Rinoa stands on an eroding cliff’s edge-- one wrong move, and she will slip beneath the water to drown. 

Behind her, she can feel the susurrus of soft white feathers, angelic in the moonlight. 

(How did she end up like this? How does a girl go from a mansion in Deling to a rebel in a train car-hideout, to a war hero, spat out an unfinished monster?)

The tide rises. The waves crash. She stands on the edge of it all, defiant in the face of the unknown. _Come and get me_ , she screams into the night, _come and take me!_

The tide rises, the tide retreats. The moon is unwilling to yield to her demands. 

Eventually, she turns her back to all of it, dripping a path along the long slow climb back to Garden. 

How does she explain the smell of sea and the grit of sand she carries into bed with her, Squall’s arm coming unconscious to wrap around her waist and hold her taut? 

She can’t. She doesn’t. 

\--

She should rest.

It’s what Quistis tells herself, anyway, running in the dark like something is chasing her (or the reverse, trying to catch all that lost time spent lying awake, staring at the ceiling of her dorm room.)

The miles are eaten up beneath her gray sneakers, gray as the clouds, the moonlight, the sea, the world leached of its color in night. She follows winding black asphalt spread out like a map, to points familiar and unknown. 

She should rest. 

How is she supposed to _rest_ after a year spent with every moment on edge, adrenaline spiked so high in her veins that it is impossible to ever achieve _rest_ again? 

She bolts past a shadow in the night, a familiar figure sketched against the darkness, but doesn’t stop to say hello, to catch up. At this hour, anyone who is out is out to be _alone_. Quistis certainly is, and Rinoa can keep her own secrets until a more sensible time. 

She should rest. 

Quistis takes the left at the fork in the road, choosing the long way into town instead of the quick loop she’d promised herself, back up the hill, back to bed where she belongs, chasing moments she will never catch. 

\--

It’s easier to sleep, Squall finds-- easier to _process his trauma_ , in Kadowaki’s blunt terms, but it makes some measure of sense. The dreams that come do not, but at least he gets the rest he so desperately needs, fatigue banished with every hour he spends unconscious. He envies Rinoa her days asleep, slipped into that magical coma and forcing everyone else to do her bidding, carrying her across the bridge, carrying her until there is no choice left to him but to send her into space, because he’s fairly certain she didn’t _dream_ during that stretch, blissfully unaware as hell rained itself down around them. 

It’s easier asleep-- but it doesn’t mean he stays that way, shifting back to vague alertness as the door to the dormitory opens, slides shut again, sounds he’s still getting used to now that Rinoa isn’t sure where she belongs, neither Timber nor here but somewhere in between. 

She draws back the covers, crawling beneath. He smells the sea clinging to her, and his bare feet brush grains of sand that must still cling to hers, now scattered across the bed. 

“You alright?” he asks into the soft curve of her shoulder, and isn’t sure he wants to know the answer. 

But she doesn’t give him anything at all, and he lays awake a long while, listening to her breathe in the dark. 

\--

Somewhere near the docks, heavy footsteps fall in sync with hers, a belated reply to a text she’d never had answered. 

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” she apologizes, as Seifer’s long stride puts him squarely in her peripheral view. 

“You didn’t.” 

It’s all he gives her, but neither of them came here for conversation anyway, did they? 

She wonders what he chases, or what he’s running away from. 

One day, Quistis thinks that she might even be brave enough to ask. 


End file.
